Baby Steps

RONNIE RAY (post-modern hippie, disheveled) is slouched at his desk, finishing the NY Times crossword puzzle and knocking back his second powerful coffee of the day (“I buy the gourmet, expensive stuff, ‘cause when I drink it, I wanna taste it.”)

RONNIE: And I still don’t know a module from a cache, MySQL from Behat from –

PUBLISHER: – And that’s fine. All I ever expected was for you to put it into good English, which is what you do.

RONNIE: Okay, but listen – I have an idea. What I’m thinking is – I build my own website - my own Drupal website! And then I write an accompanying article about the experience, from the perspective of a total newbie who knows nothing technical about Drupal or code. What do you think?

VANESSA: Your music? Maybe a bunch of your songs, footage of your band at CBGB’s, a photo of your Emmy Award –

RONNIE: – But I’m not doing music anymore, so... (shrugs) what’s the point?

VANESSA: Acting, then. Your resume, a reel – maybe those “Dead Howard” YouTube videos – that scene from Men in Black you were in –

RONNIE: – The thing is that I’m not really pursuing an acting career right now. I mean, I’m really focused on screenwriting.

VANESSA: (losing patience) Then, obviously, it should be about your screenwriting. Upload some of your scripts - those two short films you wrote – Almost Home and The Glue Story, the FunnyOrDie stuff –

RONNIE: – I guess. I mean, the more I think about it, the more the whole enterprise seems... troubling. It’s so... ME! ME! ME!

VANESSA: Of course! Wake up! Self-promotion is the whole point of having your own website.

RONNIE: That’s what I’m saying. It’s like a gigantic Tweet or FaceBook comment.

VANESSA: Ronnie, the truth is always in the last place you look.

RONNIE: Meaning?

VANESSA: Meaning, you could do with some self-promotion. (She shuts the music, blows out the candles.) Now go to sleep.

CUT TO: INTERIOR – RONNIE’S OFFICE – DAY

ANGLE ON COMPUTER MONITOR: A BLANK GOOGLE CHROME PAGE.

ANGLE ON RONNIE: He sets down his cup of coffee, his expression determined. He quickly types a few letters and hits ENTER.

ANGLE ON MONITOR: The HOME page of Drupal.org.

ANGLE ON RONNIE: His smile radiates joy and innocence – blissfully unaware of the deep pile of Drupal he is about to step into.

Ron Brawer, a native New Yorker, is Drupal Watchdog editor, and also a columnist at the magazine ("Baby Steps"). Los Angeles is his third DrupalCon. He enjoys the community, the camaraderie, and the free beer.

Having concluded the readiness assessment, we turn next to migrating the content and configuration. In reality, there’s little chance that we would migrate anything but the blogs from our old site. For the sake of giving Migrate in Core a workout with real conditions, however, we’re going to upgrade with core’s Migrate Drupal module rather than rebuilding.

Drupal Watchdog 6.01 is the first issue published by Linux New Media. Come see the Drupal Watchdog team at DrupalCon 2016!

Drupal Watchdog was founded in 2011 by Tag1 Consulting as a resource for the Drupal community to share news and information. Now in its sixth year, Drupal Watchdog is ready to expand to meet the needs of this growing community.

Drupal Watchdog will now be published by Linux New Media, aptly described as the Pulse of Open Source.